Listening

This isn't meant to be well thought out or deeply insightful. Just a thought. I was meant to be at a mystery writing workshop this week, having left last Friday with friends and gotten there Saturday and today would be the fourth day of the workshop. I'd done most of the reading for it, and was ready to go, and made the decision not to about 8 hours before I would have left.

The road to not going was, she said, mixing metaphors or something, a bit of a train wreck. There were checks that didn't come in on time though everyone else had been paid who was involved in that project. There was a day when anything and everything that could slow me down did so and that was the day before I was supposed to leave. And then that Thursday my Internet connection went down in a terminal thud and required many phone calls and several people before it was resolved yesterday, Monday. Plus I would have had to take one article with something like 23 interviews (of which I'd done 4) and the end of a nonfiction project with me and while I love the fact that I have work, and while I've done that before at an even more intense workshop (by the same people, in the same lovely Oregon coast location), it's not my favorite thing to do.

My clue came when financial insanity inserted itself and I finally threw my hands into the air and said, "Fine! I'm not arguing.  I can't go." At which point the financial insanity was lifted in two different ways, one the reassurance I could worry about it later and second that some of it was misunderstood by me.  And my mood went down instead of up. 

The thing I didn't like was the idea that I might not be going to a fiction workshop because the nonfiction wanted finishing. Nonfiction is something I love doing.  It's not the goal, though.  So I kept fighting to go, even though common sense, a train wreck of a day, financial considerations and the fact that we're moving in less than a month and have not packed even a single book should have been enough.

What was enough was my relief when I made the decision that even though the financial considerations were laid to rest, I wasn't going. I'm sorry to be missing it.  I can't help but wonder what everyone's doing right now and I wish I had that lovely beach to run on before going back to my room to write. But on Friday when my friends were driving there and I wasn't, I realized that I had budgeted time so that no one expected anything from me that day. I wasn't where I was going to be/supposed to be, so I didn't have to be anywhere. At which point I sat down and wrote 17 1/2 pages. Saturday morning I wrote one more. Yesterday, in between some of the things I would have had to do, I wrote another 10 or more pages for around 3000 words.

For me, that means I listened. Now I'm going to go write some more.